What constitutes an operating system changes with the work a system performs and the

architecture that defines how that work is done. All operating systems tend to expand out from
their initial core functionality, embedding more and more functions. And then, every once in a
while, there is a break, a shift in technology that marks a fundamental change in how computing
gets done.
It is fair to say that Windows Server 2016, which made it formal debut at Microsofts Ignite
conference this week and which starts shipping on October 1, is at the fulcrum of a profound
change where an operating system will start to look more like the distributed software substrate
built by hyperscalers and less like the IBM mainframe, a DEC VAX, or a Unix system of the past.
In a sense, there are really two Windows system platforms from Microsoft as Windows Server
2016 comes to market.
The important one for Microsofts current business is the Windows Server that looks and smells
and feels more or less like Windows Server 2012, its predecessor, and that will support the
familiar file systems, runtimes, and protocols that current Windows applications require to
execute. There are always nips and tucks to make Windows Server work better on newer
processors and I/O devices, of course, and these are important to customers. It is this Windows
Server that will keep the installed base of tens of millions of customers who run Windows
platforms in the dataclosets and datacenters of the world humming along, and we expect that
they will gradually, as time and application certification permit, move from Windows Server 2008
and 2012 to 2016 in the coming years. (The remaining Windows Server 2003 shops that are
running on operating systems that lost support in July 2015 will likely not jump all the way to
Windows Server 2016, but we shall see.)
The other Windows Server, and the one that is important for Microsofts future, is the one that its
own Azure public cloud (we got an exclusive inside look in their cloud datacenters this week) is
dying to get its hands on and that is also being infused with technologies from Azure, including its
file systems, containers, integrated software-defined networking, and a streamlined variant of the
core Windows Server kernel called Nano Server.

The Long Road From File Server To Datacenter To Cloud

In the past month, ahead of the Windows Server 2016 launch, Microsoft has been celebrating
two decades of Windows as an operating system for servers. But the origins stretch much further
back than that, for those of us who have been watching this metamorphosis of MS-DOS from the
system software on the IBM PC to a windowing environment that rivaled Apple and Unix
workstations. We will oversimplify some and ignore Microsofts dabbling with Unix (remember
Xenix?) and OS/2 (remember LAN Manager?) and just say that Microsoft always wanted to
break into the datacenter by jumping from the desktop to the closet and then stretching into the
glass house and to do so with Windows.
Back in November 1989, when Microsoft and IBM were still staunch partners in the emerging
server space, the two committed to making the 32-bit OS/2 operating system running on Intel
X86 processors the predecessors to the Xeons before Intel really had server-specific chips
the preferred server platform for graphical applications, whatever that qualification meant. At
that time, a beefy server had a single 80386 or 80486 chip, 4 MB of main memory, and a 60 MB
disk drive that came in a massive 5.25-inch form factor. This was a decade before Google started
building its own rack-scale servers from commodity parts. Three years later, in October 1992,
Windows really got its start on systems with Windows for Workgroups 3.1, and the ball really got
rolling for Windows on the server a year later when the much-better Windows for Workgroups
3.11 came out.
Overlapping this low-end, file serving variant of 16-bit Windows was, of course, Windows NT,
short for New Technology, which made its debut in July 1993 with the Windows NT 3.1 release,
sporting a new 32-bit kernel and a intended to run on DEC Alpha, SGI MIPS, IBM PowerPC, and
Intel Itanium processors as well as the X86 family of chips. It was Windows NT that put Microsoft

firmly on the path to siege the datacenter that had been carved by the DEC VAX and other
proprietary minis starting in the late 1970s and the Unix vendors starting in the middle 1980s.
When Dave Cutler, the inventor of the VMS operating system, moved to Microsoft in 1988, even
before the OS/2 announcement by IBM and Microsoft mentioned above, the writing was surely
on the wall. Cutler, who has been a Senior Technical Fellow at Microsoft for more than a decade
now, helped create the Windows NT kernel, worked on various Windows Server releases, then
the Azure platform team, and now is creating virtual infrastructure for the Xbox Live online
gaming platform.

Which brings us to our point. Windows Server 2016 does not, as the Microsoft marketing
message suggests, represent 20 years of its aspirations for systems rather than PCs. There is at
least another decade more of history before Windows NT 4.0 came out, which is where Microsoft
is currently drawing the starting line on its run to the datacenter.
We will concede that with Windows NT Server 4.0, Microsoft was absolutely credible as a
platform for SMBs and could take on Unix and the emerging Linux as an application and Web
serving platform along with the traditional print and file serving duties that Windows for
Workgroups and Windows NT 3.1, 3.5, and 3.51 were doing just as the word server was
coming into common use and replaced the word system in the datacenter lingo. Here is what
the history of Windows as a server really looks like:

And if you wanted to get into it with finer-grained detail, you would have to show all of the
variations and permutations of the Windows Server platform within each version and release.
The Windows Server platform and when we talk about it, we by necessity bring in email,
database, Web, and application serving because these are key drivers of the stack is much
more complex and has become increasingly so as time has gone by.

Jeffrey Snover, Technical Fellow and chief architect for Windows Server and Azure Stack,
briefed The Next Platform at Microsoft headquarters ahead of the Windows Server 2016 launch.
Snover walked us through the important phases in the development of the Windows platform,
beginning with the mass commercialization made possible by Windows NT 4.0 Server.
This iteration of Windows Server was less expensive than the Unixes of the time that ran on
powerful and pricey RISC machines, and it had the virtue of also running on cheaper (but
somewhat less capable) X86 hardware. The X86 hardware would grow up and Windows Server
along with it, eventually vanquishing Unix workstations from the market and killing off the volume
business that helped Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Silicon Graphics support
their respective Unix server businesses. (The same way that volume manufacturing of Core
chips for PCs helps Intel invest in and profit from Xeon and Xeon Phi server chips.) At this point,
Unix systems are waning, and IBM is building an OpenPower fleet for its Power architecture to
sail across the sea to Linux Land, which is dominated by Xeon boxes just like the much larger
territory (as measured by both server revenues and shipments) of the vast continent of Windows
Land.
By 2000, as the dot-com boom was starting to go bust and Linux was taking over for Unix,
Microsoft was pushing more deeply into the enterprise and Windows Server 2000 made a
fundamental leap along with the Intel Xeon architecture. The three big developments were Active
Directory authentication, which drives a huge part of the Windows Server and Azure cloud
business today, Wolfpack clustering of Windows instances for failover and workload sharing
(which debuted on Windows NT 4.0 Server but matured substantially with Windows 2000
Server), and support of non-uniform memory access (NUMA) shared memory clustering within a
single system. The Wolfpack clustering and NUMA support made Windows Server a credible
alternative to Unix on big iron systems, and really opened the door for large email and database
serving for the Windows platform.
The initial NUMA support allowed for up to 32 logical processors and up to 128 GB of memory to
be supported by the Windows kernel running on Intel Itanium servers; it was later doubled up to
64 sockets in a shared memory system, and with Windows Server 2003, 64 logical processors
was standard in Datacenter Edition (with Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition scaling across
fewer sockets), and a special variant allowed a single instance of Windows to span across 128
logical processors with two partitions. (This was before Hyper-V server virtualization, mind you.)
The way Microsoft implemented NUMA in both Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008,
it counted threads like logical processors, so you could only span up to 64 sockets if you had 64
single-core Xeon chips with HyperThreading turned off. With Windows Server 2012, NUMA
support was extended to 320 logical processors, and with Windows Server 2016, NUMA scaling
is expanded to 512 logical processors and, perhaps more importantly, the maximum host
memory is expanded to 24 TB, a factor of 6X greater than the upper limit with Windows Server
2012.
It is also significant that the underlying Hyper-V server virtualization hypervisor integrated with
Windows Server can support larger virtual machine instances. With Hyper-V 2016, the hypervisor
supports up to 240 logical processors (a factor of 3.75X more than Hyper-V 2012) and the
maximum memory per VM is expanded to 12 TB, a factor of 12X increase.

As you can see, Hyper-V is getting out in front of VMwares ESXi 6.0 hypervisor in terms of
scale, and this is significant because the overwhelming majority of workloads that are virtualized
by VMwares stack are based on various versions of Windows Server. Microsoft has been
chipping away at VMware accounts for some time, and is keeping the pressure on high. That
said, most applications do not need the full scale of memory and compute that are available in
the Hyper-V, ESXi, KVM, or Xen hypervisors for X86 iron. This is no longer a bottleneck for most
customers, just like NUMA scaling for operating systems and databases has not been since
maybe the Windows Server 2008 generations. To be sure, Microsoft has to keep up with the
ever-increasing core counts and physical memory footprints of Xeon E5 and Xeon E7 machines,
just like the Linux community has to. You cant leave cores and memory chips stranded.

Scale Down Is As Important As Scale Up

With the advent of the Azure public cloud and the backcasting of some technologies, such as
shared storage and software-defined networking, into the Windows Server platform and the
development of others aimed specifically at Azure, such as the Nano Server minimalist variant of
Windows Server for supporting applications created from containerized chunks of code, called
microservices, Windows in the datacenter is undergoing yet another metaphor change and
technical evolution.
The neat bit is that Windows Server is gaining new approaches, but not eliminating old ones, and
this is one of its strengths. Speaking very generally, and we realize there are always exceptions
and issues, the client/server and Web applications that were written for prior generations of
Windows will continue to work. The new world of Nano Server and containers is a deployment
option, not a requirement. The point is, Microsoft understands that the enterprise world wants to
go hybrid, and that means two different things. In one way, hybrid means running some
applications in-house and some in the cloud, and in another, it means running some applications
in a legacy Windows Server mode and other, newer applications in a Nano Server and container
mode.
This is by necessity, as has always been the case with data processing.
Companies have spent years building virtualized datacenters that do not actually look anything
like public clouds, according to Snover, and he is right. That includes those customers using the
Microsoft platform, where the forthcoming Azure Stack (which was supposed to be announced in
October and which has been pushed out) is based on Windows Server but it is a very different
animal indeed.

Some people feel that they are building the wrong things, and it reminds me of an old adage:
When you find out that you are on the wrong road, turn around no matter how much progress
you have made. A lot of people feel like they have done that, they have this sense that they are
on the wrong road. We hear this a lot from people doing OpenStack. They are a couple of years
into this, they have got a group of people who are experts in infrastructure and open source
software, and then they ask themselves how is this helping them sell more cars or airplane
tickets, how is this really moving the business forward?

Moving forward in many cases will mean continuous application development running on
containers and using a minimalist operating system, and that is why Microsoft is adding Windows
Server Containers, Hyper-V Containers, and the Nano Server distribution of the Windows Server
operating system with the 2016 version. We are going to drill down into these technologies,
which are not yet deployed even on Microsofts Azure public cloud, but an overview here is
appropriate. Nano Server eats up less memory and storage to run and has a much lower attack
surface for malware and is also easier to update and keep secure. These are designed for a
future that does not look like the past, and other technologies, such as Storage Spaces Direct
hyperconverged storage and the Azure SDN stack are being added to Windows Server 2016 to
make it suitable for other kinds of applications that are somewhere between Windows Server and
Azure.
But in the end, unless customers put up a big fuss, the future will look more and more like Azure,
as embodied in the Azure Stack approach to building a true cloud, and less like the Windows
Server way that most enterprise are long familiar with. Now that these technologies are coming
to market, the time has come to dig in and analyze, which you know The Next Platform likes to
do.